One more "zone" of privacy between "City" and "Exact"

Clearly, they don't "cover the basic privacy needs of everyone", otherwise I wouldn't be making this post.

My point is that I have more than three levels of friendship in my life, and it would be really nice to have additional options.

I both agree and disagree with you on this subject. On one hand, I find the City privacy level a bit laughable seeing as how I live in the country and a "City" privacy level doesn't do me much good. On the other hand I don't like the thought of adding a privacy level for this or that. Once you start adding privacy levels, as with anything, where do you put a stop to it?

But now that I rethink the issue, I have pretty much the same thoughts as you, with one difference :) Don't add another level, just change the City privacy level to a distance level (something like 10miles, 5miles, 1mile).

That would be perfect, and exactly what I need. Thanks for your comments. I wonder if this is something the development team is working on? Do others feel this way?

I suggest zip-code level. That's the privacy level that most dating sites use, and many other social networking sites. People are familiar and comfortable with the idea of zip code granularity.

Distance-based may suffer the same problem as city. 100 yards in the country might not mean much, while 100 yards in a big city can be a world away.

Zip code has the added advantage of being more precise and easy to calculate. There is no guesswork about the distance between points A and B.

Finally, zip codes are easy to display. "Fred is in 94608" makes sense. What exactly do you display with distance-based privacy?

Perhaps, but I still like the idea of distance. Some Zip codes are pretty big, which proves your point even more about being "a world away" if you're in the city.

Instead of "Fred is in 94608", it would say "Fred checked in within 800 meters of you". You can already see this functionality in the sidebar of the "Around me" tab with regard to complete strangers, so why can't I apply it to my friends? It would appear that the API is already there and functional.

But what would it say in Fred's stream? Looking at Fred's stream directly, one expects Fred's checkins to be listed without context. That is, they aren't related to your checkins or anybody else's. You might not even be logged in. How does Brightkite handle the distance issue in that case?

Displaying location fuzzed by a particular distance factor introduces a long list of questions that must be answered before the code can be written. With zip codes, these questions have already been answered and the implementations are well understood.

As for some zip codes being pretty big, I agree, but that's not a bad thing, it's a good thing. Zip code size mirrors population density and bear some loose relation to neighborhoods, while fixed distances do not.

There are a couple points to make here.
1) ZIP codes have very little to do with population density, and actually can span multiple cities. See Wikipedia for more info on this.
2) Fred's stream is different depending on who is looking at it anyway, so this would have zero impact on it. When a close friend looks, it would list Fred's exact location. When I look, it would add the "Fuzzy" modifier.

I'm not saying that I have the answers on how to make this happen. I'm simply saying that the service is useless to me as is (and wouldn't much improve with ZIP code). However, if friendship levels could be defined by distance, then it would be enormously useful.

From an end user perspective, the "How" isn't so important as the "What". If it can't be done, then so be it. But the difficulty of implementation has no bearing on whether or not it is useful to me as is.

The biggest question in my mind is what I listed in my last post: I am shown the distance to complete strangers in my "Around me" tab, so why can't I define that for my friends?

How is "Fred is in 94608" supposed to help me? Am I supposed to know what that means? Where is 94608? Using zip codes creates more problems than it solves. People can't easily understand zip codes, unless you're a postal worker that is. As illustrated above, the zip code has no meaning to anyone not familiar with it. In fact, zip codes causes more confusion, and thus harm to the service, than a simple distance.

mkb, you raise an interesting point regarding determining distance via your location. Maybe the easiest way to solve the problem would be to display a "Nearest City" level to people who are not signed in, yet those who are signed in recieve the "Distance from your location" level. Or maybe something totally different could be used. But please, don't use zip codes!

Great idea! I really would like a "Street" or "Neighborhood" level, that would enable the $street tag in custom notification messages (and shows the street name on the website), while being exactly like "City" in any other way. Also see my comments to http://is.gd/WLM

There are definitely neighbourhoods in large cities that might be worth including. Or villages around big cities that might get swallowed up. But I'd also agree that if a friend wanted to show you where they were exactly, they'd probably mark you as a trusted friend. For frequent travellers, city is probably close enough - it works on Dopplr.

What I would really like to see is a "country" level for showing everyone - instead of having to choose between "city" and "hidden". It'd be nice to show the world which country I'm in, without having to give away exactly where I am within that country. Its tough when you know there are people out there who would really like to know where you are, but you know it wouldn't be a good idea; equally, it's sad to not be able to engage with sites like this if you're in that position. So a "country" level of detail would be great I think for that.

Don't forget: you're global. Just talking about "I know of no databases which can map a US address to a neighborhood name" shows a tendency to have a US-centric worldview.

You could try to make use of some C# code I have for you (contact me privately) for requesting a location name from the open source OpenStreetMap.org database given a WGS84 coordinate. This returns the closest (city/suburb/village/hamlet/place) name. This lets people add a name they would like to see (OSM is usereditable, like wikipedia) and is global instead of just US by design.

Or just check out http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.p... for technical info (I just a "places near ###.#,######.#######" type query). Check out http://gazetteer.openstreetmap.org/na... for a GUI example of the NameFinder results.

Maybe this could be a new custom message tag, named something like "$osm"?